respond to the following:
Describe a current safety concern in your practice environment.
Blood and blood product transfusion errors are a safety issue in my practice environment. Recently there have been a couple of incorrect blood products to a patient and the patients have had reactions to the incorrect blood products. When the blood products are being administered in an urgent situation, the patient identification verifications have been bypassed.
Explain one HIT that could be applied to address the concern.
One HIT that could be applied to address the concern is a barcode-enabled point-of-care system.
Explain how it could be applied to enhance safety.
The barcode-enabled point-of-care system is put into place to avoid wrong patient/wrong treatment. With the barcode-enabled point-of-care system the patient should be scanned first and verification of patient identifiers should be confirmed. Scanning the patient should alert any provider if the person is not the intended patient. Next, any medication, blood, or blood product should be scanned to help confirm that the correct product is being administered to the patient. The patient and products should always be scanned prior to the patient receiving anything in order to avoid the wrong products being administered.
Identify at least one possible unintended consequence of adopting the HIT.
One possible unintended consequence of adopting the HIT is if the system has unintended downtime. During downtime the barcode-enabled point-of-care system is not able to be used. Lyon et al. (2023) evaluated downtime in healthcare and stated that anything that goes up, must come down, and that includes EHR and barcode-enabled point-of-care systems.
Discuss at least one strategy for mitigating the unintended consequence.
One strategy for mitigating unintended downtime would be to have a downtime safety folder in multiple areas that are easy to locate. Within the folders would be information on how to safely navigate patient care and administration of products without the system and how to properly make documentation of what the patient had received. According to a study performed by Larsen et al. (2019), which studied the dangers of downtime, having good communication about what to do during downtime is very important to do ahead of time and having a good system in place that is easy to utilize is key to downtime success.
References
Larsen, E., Hoffman, D., Rivera, C., Kleiner, B. M., Wernz, C., & Ratwani, R. M. (2019). Continuing Patient Care during Electronic Health Record Downtime. Applied clinical informatics, 10(3), 495–504. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0039-1692678Links to an external site.
Lyon, R., Jones, A., Burke, R., & Baysari, M. T. (2023). What Goes Up, Must Come Down: A State-of-the-Art Electronic Health Record Downtime and Uptime Procedure in a Metropolitan Health Setting. Applied clinical informatics, 14(3), 513–520. https://doi.org/10.1055/s-0043-1768995